Orwellian: Feds Spend $500,000 to Tap “Extensive Tracking Infrastructure” to “Combat Online Trolling”

The National Science Foundation has issued two quarter-of-a-million-dollar grants for “Leveraging Personalized Internet Services to Combat Online Trolling”.

The grant defines online trolling as, “scenarios in which various groups deploy tactics to influence public opinion on the Internet, by leaving biased, false, misleading, and inauthentic comments, and then artificially amplifying their ratings,” so you can immediately see where that’s a slippery slope to shutting down free speech and dissent because who decides what is “false, misleading, and inauthentic” online?

The government’s researchers?

Creepier, the grant admits that we are increasingly tracked as our privacy is increasingly going extinct on the internet, and it is this built-in “extensive tracking infrastructure” that will be tapped to combat trolling online:

Users have often expressed concern about the lack of privacy and control over their personal data. Nonetheless, despite a substantial effort to expose and control this prevalent behavior, the reality is that users keep accepting updated online privacy policies, which in turn grant the gathering of more personal data. This project explores re-using this extensive tracking infrastructure for the benefits of both the users themselves and web services, with a goal of preventing online trolling…

The goal is reportedly to create a “personalization-based counter-trolling system as open-source software”.

Kind of ironic when you think about how much money Hillary has spent amassing her very own online troll army… Then again, the “combat” here will be reserved for dissenters George Orwell style, as per the usual.